As discussed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/548,683 by Carolyn Spier filed on Aug. 27, 2009, assigned to the assignee hereof and incorporated herein by reference, prognostication algorithms have been utilized to predict faults in the operation of vehicles. More importantly the prognostics algorithm, referred to herein as the PRDICTR algorithm, is used to analyze data from vehicles at a central or remote location where the algorithms can be run on relatively complex large fast computers. As originally described, the PRDICTR algorithms are computationally intense and were developed mainly for Class 8 vehicles which are greater than 30,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. Even if the prognostication algorithms are run at a vehicle, they require computational assets that are far in excess of those that can be offered by microprocessors. Thus hosting a prognostication algorithm on a vehicle requires not only a considerable amount of computer power, but also a considerable amount of space.
The problem therefore becomes is how to embed prognostication in lightweight vehicles where only microprocessors are available for performing any on-board computation. There is therefore a requirement for a stripped down version of the prognostication algorithm to be able to operate on smaller processors such as microprocessors.